I think it's the whole "blood in the water" effect. Google Play Store and Apple App Store are being sued and losing, so next target that could match is Steam.

The issues I see here is that Steam isn't anything like the other two. Steam isn't the default app store of any OS besides SteamOS, and even it gives more easy access to competing stores then Android. Not to mention, this lawsuit is based on sales from 2018, way before SteamOS was revived, so it wouldn't apply. Because of this, the lawsuit can't claim a lack of competition due to muscling out others from "their" devices.

While they can claim that Steam is the largest player and thus a monopoly, it wouldn't work because they aren't using their size negatively against their competition. They aren't blocking others on their devices, they aren't putting up road blocks to competitors, and unless I'm missing something they haven't been making deals to prevent competition. Google and Apple have had court loses due to these types of abuses of power, but again, unless I'm missing something, Valve hasn't done any of those.

Maybe Google is copying Apple here and using it to sell ads.

If you read the privacy policy of Apple Pay, it does mention that Apple does collect info about your Apple Pay usage for ads ("Helping you to discover features that are most relevant to you", "Sending you communications about Apple Pay and other Apple products, services, and offers that may be of interest to you" is how they refer to it.)

"Apple may use this information to improve other Apple products and services, for marketing, and for fraud and security purposes."

They go back largely because MS will give them deep discounts. MS has four decades of experience of undercutting potential competition with loss leaders and similar tactics. The motives then were largely that open source represented significant savings, but now it's about data and technology sovereignty.

I have no idea what any of this means, or has to do with Harris or Walz.

You mean, the couldn't stomach a sane government run by rational people?

In the short term it would most certainly hit profits, not merely because of lower revenues from interest, but because credit card is unsecured, bad debts taking a bigger bite out of profits. The ultimate result would be that it would become much harder to get a credit card. In the end consumers would effectively have their short-term lending capacity reduced.

> will put privacy protections in place that matches it's corporate policy.

Which when you actually read Apples privacy policy isnt much different than Googles.

There's this guy who came up with E=MC^2. The photon's energy can be converted to massless particles under certain conditions, such as the production of electron-positron pairs.

This demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what light and gravity. Photons in a vacuum follow the curvature of space, that curvature being gravity. Mass bends space, the more extreme the mass, the greater the curvature, which photons follow. But the photons themselves have no mass.

Nobody ever went broke assuming people are ignorant morons.

So it's your underlying claim that thermodynamics doesn't exist and energy just sort of disappears.

So what you're saying is your average American is a fucking moron.

I can get behind that.

I've done quite of work on Calc, and never had much of a problem. It's not a one-to-one match with Excel, but I've had few issues. I don't really use Powerpoint or Impress, save to view presentations, and haven't seen any significant issues.

I have used Writer *a lot* (I've written a novel and several proposals and projects). Once I got it used to it, I actually prefer the way I can work styles in Writer to Word, and every time I'm forced back into using Word, I find it just a huge pain in the ass. In general it doesn't molest docx files too much (unlike Google Docs which horribly mutilates styles).

I'm pretty much using LO full time at work now, and only use Word and Excel when I log on our Terminal Services server. I'm not sure I'd ever be brave enough to completely abandon Office, but I'm definitely not looking at further re-entrenching myself.

So, like Dungeons and Dragons and Judas Priest before them, AI models are now blamed for underlying mental health issues that they have nothing to do with.

Bring on the AI moral panic. As if we didn't have enough of those these days.

Can't wait for the groovy A flat, Asus4-G sharp-sus5, F sharp add11 song, with the C minor dim7 root for the bridge.